I read a lot online. I tend to gravitate toward book blogs and video game sites, which makes sense with my background. Me recent perusals have brought up two wildly different topics, and I’ve decided to just write about both of them.
ON BOOKS
Recurring articles pop up all the time in the book-o-sphere, and one that always catches my eye are bloggers and industry folk discussing their “journey” with eBooks. See, many of them were staunch opponents to eBooks. On one end of the spectrum there are folks who didn’t want to support eBooks because they thought it to be the demise of their favorite industry and/or pastime. On the other end are the more hipster-ish arguments claiming that the feel or smell of a physical book is integral to the reading experience.
First, let me say that both of these arguments are bullshit. The publishing game is changing, yes, but the idea that upheaval in the modern book industry would result in the death of prose as an artform is ludicrous. Any arguments regarding the book as a physical object being an inseparable core aspect of the reading experience is equally silly: it is the words on the page that keep you reading, and I defy anyone to tell me with a straight face that when they are immersed in a story they still pay attention to how the pages smell.
On the other hand, I agree that the early days of eBooks were pretty rough. Reading a book off of an LCD screen – especially an older one with a lower refresh-rate – was physically painful for me, causing me tons of eye strain and headaches. Upon the invention and refinement of ePaper, though, all of those barriers go away.
I was thinking about writing an article about my “journey” into eBooks, but it really boils down to this: ePaper is awesome, eBooks rock, and the moment that had the ability to rid myself of stacks and stacks of books and replace them with a single device that could, ostensibly, hold every book I’d ever want to read presented itself I jumped in with both feet. I’m sold.
ON VIDEO GAMES
The big hubbub today centers around EA’s release of the new SimCity title, a game they showed at last year’s E3. In a surprise to exactly no one, EA’s been having all kinds of troubles maintaining the persistent, always-on internet connection required to play the game. Players have reported everything from 5+ hour downloads to the loss of hours of gameplay due to a server hiccup to the complete inability to connect at all.
I remember watching the demo for this title during E3 and being really excited for it. I used to play a ton of SimCity on an old Mac Classic, spending hours and hours using cheat codes to get extra money while having natural disasters turned off, then building up a giant metropolis only to turn natural disasters back on and watch the whole thing sink into what amounted to an apocalypse.
When they announced that the game required a persistent internet connection, though, I immediately scratched it off of my want list. The entire concept that if my internet connection goes down I suddenly lose access to games that I’ve either purchased in physical form or downloaded to a local device is appalling to me. It has, and always will be, a deal-breaker.
I really wish I could be a fly on the wall in meetings where executives discuss the reasoning behind requiring an internet connection to play single-player games. Video game industry folk try to sell us this idea as an anti-piracy measure, but I believe that’s more smokescreen than anything else. Executive-level folks like to make a big deal out of piracy, but it has considerably less effect on a company’s bottom line than many would lead us to believe.
In reality it’s more of a way for them to collect data on their players and target all of us with advertising. Plus, with the video game industry about to enter a major era of flux, game companies are panicking because they have no idea what gamers want anymore. Many of them believe that collecting this sort of data will help them figure out what the next big thing will be before it gets here. What they don’t realize is that with game development cycles that last 3+ years, the fickle nature of the industry will have changed between development and release, so all you can do is cross your fingers and hope.
In the meantime, the larger companies like EA and Blizzard are instituting this asinine always-on DRM that will end up losing them way more customers than piracy ever would. How about trying a different tactic: make good games, and make them as easy to obtain and play as humanly possible, for a decent price. Could it truly be that simple? Seems pretty basic to me.
